Beautiful, unpredictable and sometimes tragic, LIFE.

Charlie, our little angel~  09/2010- 02/6/2012

So I was hoping to first post about mine and Jason's trip down to Florida, but life is unpredictable, right? 

I suppose one of my reservations about going out of town and leaving my sweet boys and animals behind is the thought about the "what-if's" that could happen.  I am sure I am not the only one in the history of this civilization that has had these kinds of thoughts, or scenarios run through my head, but I feel sometimes, like I am.  And the next question is, do I create a reality as a direct result of my thoughts?  One can always speculate, I guess.  It's like that Law of Attraction thing~  you attract what you think and feel, right??  Well then if that's the case, why don't I attract my imaginings of winning the lottery or traveling the world, or running my own business doing something I love...??  Why does it always seem like I turn my worries and fears into my reality instead of the other way around?  Sometimes I feel like life just doesn't make any sense and that it is downright cruel, especially the people that habitate on it...but that's another story for another time. 

So with that said, I have to say that traveling without the WHOLE family together leaves a gap for me to fill in with the incessant worries about what COULD happen...I think the usual is, what if I die in a fiery airplane crash and leave my children mother/fatherless?  What would become of them, what would be their fate?  What if something happens to one of them because I wasn't there to "control" the situation??  I came to a realization that I have an issue with needing to feel in control, and it comes out in so many situations and I think I'm finally starting to realize when this happens.  My biggest hurdle to overcome, I feel, is to let go of that control and let God take care of things...and then I did and look what happened when I let go of that control!!  <insert angry face, fist shaking in the air>

I know I need to look on the bright side of things and gratefully report that I came home to all of my boys alive and healthy...(well, the healthy part, not-so-much as I've been dealing with sick kids since Jason and myself got home, grrrrr!) but in general, yes, HEALTHY.   My house was still standing and nobody got into trouble with the law, haha.  But amidst all of the good stuff that was there when we got back, there was also the realization of the sadness and sense of loss we were also coming back to.  While it thankfully wasn't one of our sweet children, it was still a part of our family that we lost in a freak accident while we were away.  That piece of the family pie was our furry little feline child, Charlie. One of our boys didn't die, but our kitty died; and not in a "glad-she-was-put-out-of her-misery" kind of way, but in a tragic, something that you don't want to think about, kind of way. 

Jason and I left early, early Saturday morning of the 4th and were to come back late, late on the 7th.  I had typed up instructions for all of the boys in great detail, along with meal plans and directions on how to operate the tv/dvd systems and of course, the washer and dryer in case anything needed to be washed.  I thought I was super-prepared to leave and I even put a note on the microwave to kindly remind my mom to turn off the stove/ovens after they'd been used; my mom can be a little scatter-brained so I felt that putting that up would give ME peace of mind that the house wouldn't accidentally burn down!

I get a call Monday morning from Cameron saying that he's sick and doesn't think he can go to school; I hear the coughing and know that he is indeed, not well enough to go to school.  So I give the school a call and let them know he won't be coming in that day, and hang up thinking that's that.  Not a big deal, I'm sure my mom can handle having him at home even though that wasn't in the "plans".   Well, just as unpredictable life is and seems to make plans of its own, I get the call that forever will haunt me until I can find out why it had to happen in the first place...I pick up my phone and listen in and all I can hear is commotion and upset in the background, sounded like Cameron was hysterical and I'm thinking to myself, "he must have the croup and isn't able to breathe very well so he's become hysterical and my mom is calling me to find out what to do for him".  That's a logical thought given the fact that this has happened before where his cough has escalated into the croup and I just figured that I'd be giving my mom directions on helping his cough to ease up.  But this wasn't the case as she proceeded to tell me through sobbing and crying, that the kitty was in the washer and it was dead!  It must have gotten washed and drowned somehow, but it was dead!!  I couldn't believe what I was hearing and yet it's almost as if my subconcious memory had been through it all before, it seemed oddly familiar with how it was all playing out. 

I started crying and repeating, "She's dead?  Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry mom, I'm so sorry!!  Do you want me to have somebody come over and help you?  You need somebody to come and help you with the boys!!  Oh my gosh, I can't belive this happened!!", and all of the other things I was saying, as the shock was hitting me hard from what I was hearing on the other end of the phone.  I was shaking, in disbelief, I felt sick to my stomach and I was trying to process how this could have happened in the first place.  Washed??!  How does one wash a cat on accident without knowing the cat was in there?  Did my 2 1/2 year old turn on the washer somehow??  My mom didn't know, but to me I couldn't figure how she had drowned from being washed as you have to physically load the clothes into the washer first and one would definitely see the cat inside if that were to happen...

I hung up and was crying and shaking uncontrollably...Jason was in one of the seminars for the convention we went down there for, and I just remember texting him to please come back to the room.  His immediate response was, of course, what's wrong?  I text him back that "Lucy's dead!!"  I was assuming it was her, and I suppose I need to explain a little about the washing machine we have and how it played a part in the demise of our sweet little Charlie, first.
We got Lucy and Charlie back in October of 2010, sisters.  It was actually my mom who told me about them.  We had just lost our kitty, Shadow, that we had had since 1999 and it was upsetting for us, but we figured she was going to pass as her health had rapidly declined and we kind of expected it to happen.  We have a cat Zoey that we got at the same time we got Shadow, as we adopted them from the Humane Society of Utah and so they had been with us even before we had our boys.  We also have another cat, Maizy which I had found at a church building in the middle of winter, and couldn't just leave her there.  I brought her home thinking we would find her owners after posting a "found cat" sign, but nobody ever called so we just added her to our family, as well. 


At the time Shadow had wandered off to go and die, Maizy had disappeared as well.  She would periodically do this so I wasn't too concerned, but she also hadn't come back either, and I think we assumed she might have died somewhere, too...so the thought of having lost 2 cats at once and only having Zoey left, I was thinking it might be nice to bring in another friend for her so she wouldn't be lonely, hence I decided to go and check out the kittens that my mom's neighbor's cat had.  They sure were cute, little fur-balls they were!!  I had my eye on this particular kitty who seemed to be the fluffiest and she almost resembled a little lion...she was fiesty and would nibble my fingers and play around with me, so I thought, this is the one!  I want this one.  That is, until my mom convinced me take another one along with her so that they could be together; that it would be better for them AND for us if they stayed together.  There were 4 of them total, so I wasn't sure which one out of the other 3 we should take, so I just told my mom to have them pick out the one that was the closest one to the kitty I had picked out.

 I was pretty sure that Jason wouldn't like this one little bit;  I mean bringing home another new kitty was one thing, but to bring home TWO, would really be pushing it.  But I also justified it by saying to myself that if the kids would be happy and I would be happy to have a couple of new furry family members added to our home, then why can't we be the ones to make that decision?!  So I decided that they were coming home whether he liked it or not :)

Maizy actually showed up the day when we happened to stumble upon Shadown's body~ oddly, Cameron had been the one to find her as she had gone off to die in the empty lot next to our neighbors driveway and had started decomposing there and he spotted her laying in the weeds.  It was a shock and we were sad but I was also grateful we had found her body so we could bury her and put her to rest; I was really grateful to be able to do that.  I don't know what the connection was with Maizy being gone until we found out where Shadow's body was, but I don't know how much of a coincidence it was that she just happened to come out of 'hiding' within the hour of finding Shadow and burying her.  So we now had 4 cats again, but I'm a cat person and these 2 new little fur-balls were a delight to have in our family. 

                              You can see why I couldn't resist taking these cuties home!!

So they eventually ended up in the laundry room as their homebase.  Their food was there, their litter, and soft places to sleep.  I have a front-loading washer and so the tight seal that the door has when it closes causes a moldy, musty smell.  I just decided to leave the door ajar to air out and I've been doing that ever since we got them.  It never occured to me that it would also be the last place where Charlie would breathe her last breath of life. 

In the morning as I would usually let them out of the laundry room, I would see that Lucy preferred to sleep inside the stainless steel washer drum, which I thought nothing of, until now, of course.  Jason would usually close up the door because it was slightly in the way when you'd walk in there, and he thought it was unsanitary to let them sleep in there because of the fact that that is where we washed our clothes (ok, how much more unsanitary could they be from your dirty underwear, DH??)
So I would just open it up again, ha!  Take that Jason :)

It didn't even cross my mind to tell my mom this~ she's stayed over before and nothing bad ever happened; I had also left her detailed instructions on how to operate the washer/dryer and made sure to put that she should leave the door open to air it out...not so that the kitties wouldn't get shut in and suffocate!!  Hindsight is an annoying little bugger sometimes, and I keep kicking myself of what I woulda, shoulda, coulda done to prevent this from happening. 

Charlie inevitably was supposed to leave this earth and it was going to happen whether I was home, or not; whether my mom was going to absent-mindedly close the washer door, unbeknownst that Charlie was stuck inside or whether she could have been crushed by something in the house and gone that way...we'll never know, and what happened can't be undone.  I think I am having the hardest time with that part, just knowing that her passing away is FINAL in an earthly sense.

I know and believe that her spirit is alive and well, in the spirit world where there are countless concourses of animal spirits!!  That definitely brings me comfort, but remembering what she was doing, just a WEEK ago, and now she's gone, that's what I can't spend too much time thinking about or I feel sick.  How and if she suffered in that torture chamber, that makes me sick...so I try to get out of those thinking patterns and just try to accept things the way they are, even if I am just so sad. 
Another very tough part of what happened was having to tell my boys that Charlie had died...we are all animal lovers and she was a part of our family;  I knew that Jaeden and Braxton would probably take it the hardest.  I wonder if Cameron shut down about the whole situation because he was there, he saw Charlie after my mom pulled her out of the washer, and he had to deal with a very hard emotional situation, and I wasn't there to comfort him, or his brothers!!  I didn't want to, but knew that I needed to be the one to tell them what had happened.  And being 3,000 miles away didn't help with having to do that!!

We had a little burial for her last night and I am glad that we got that out of the way...we had her in some garbage bags in the garage and I hated having to go in there and see that she was just stowed away in some trash bags like that, her little body outlining what she once was around our home, and the personality she possessed...and then I have to remind myself that her spirit lives on; it was her SPIRIT that gave her that spark of life, her personality, even her odd behaviors sometimes.  Her body was like a glove that a hand is taken out of and no longer moves, wiggles.  But there is something about seeing that body and wanting to still hold onto that, even if it is lifeless.  That's another hard part about losing an animal or loved one.

Luckily for me I haven't lost a close family member so this was probably the closest thing to that very thing.  Jason and I lost a dear friend 4 1/2 years ago who died tragically and suddenly and that shook me pretty hard; but other than losing grandparents whom I really didn't know very well, I'm having to learn how hard it is to lose somebody, whether that be a human or an animal, and having to accept that they aren't there anymore; they were here, and you remember the memories of them, and then they're gone, only to give those memories more meaning. 

I hope this isn't to prepare me and my family to have to deal with the loss of someone close to us anytime soon, but like my title of "Beautiful, unpredictable and sometimes tragic, LIFE", that's exactly what it is.  You never know what you're going to get, and sometimes that's welcomed and sometimes, not so much.  I guess the lesson is learning to accept what happens and trust that God is in control and things happen for a reason...or so we're told, right??  I'm trying to be ok with that, but right now it's difficult and I hope to be more enlightened after this experience.  In the meantime I will try to remember the fun times and memories that I have in my mind and in my heart about sweet little Charlie.  I wanted to share some pictures of her and the time she had with us on this earth, which definitely wasn't long enough~ but when is it long enough when you lose a loved one?  What you wouldn't give to get one more day with them to say what you wish you could have, or treated them better or said you'd loved them more. 

Lucy on the top left, Charlie on the bottom right.

Charlie decided she'd like to be a part of the proud zucchini moment as I was taking this picture, and hopped up on the table to get in on the action, silly thing~!